ABSTRACT

Jomon culture is known for its long duration as an intermittently complex hunter-gatherer society. Although its subsistence economy was based mainly on hunting, shing and gathering, Jomon society was marked by a sedentary lifestyle and elaborate material culture, including pottery and polished stone tools. Their unique material culture included baked clay gurines and large circular settlements. I examine social and cognitive factors related to these latter aspects of Jomon culture to elucidate the uniqueness of Jomon worldviews and their relationships to universal human cognition. Currently, there are various competing views concerning the social complexity, hierarchy and kinship systems of Jomon societies. Traditional understanding based on a Marxist framework has regarded Jomon societies as egalitarian, free of warfare and governed by magic and taboos (Tsuboi 1962). In contrast, Hayden put Late and Terminal Jomon in his category of “entrepreneur communities,” which are the most hierarchical among transegalitarian societies next to chiefdoms, together with other examples including early Neolithic cultures in the Balkan area (Hayden 1995). Hayden’s model stimulated some Japanese archaeologists to look into the dynamic power negotiations in Jomon society, while other Japanese archaeologists independently developed a model of social stratication in the Jomon period (Sasaki 2002; Watanabe 1990). In spite of all the evidence of social complexity, however, a period of more than 10,000 years was not sufcient for Jomon people to develop an overtly hierarchical society such as a chiefdom or state. Figurines as Archaeological Evidence of Worldview

Anthropomorphic gurines are not unique to the Jomon culture but have been found in a number of cultures, such as the European Neolithic. The widespread popularity of anthropomorphic gurines may be explained from the perspective of universal human cognition. Based on the understanding derived from recent interdisciplinary developments in cognitive science that the human mind consists of many domain-specic cognitive systems, Pascal Boyer argues that some beliefs are much more salient, attractive and easy to spread compared to others (Boyer 2001). The most salient, attractive and thus culturally successful beliefs and concepts,

he argues, are the ones which mostly t into the expectations of the relevant cognitive domains except for one violation, like the typical image of a ghost who thinks and behaves like a person but does not have a physical body. The author considers that anthropomorphic gurines fall under the category of this type of “cognitive optimum,” a concept that is both attentiongrabbing and allows for rich inferences (Boyer 2001:100). The high potential of human-shaped artefacts may explain why they are so ubiquitous and seem to have been reinvented many times in many places in human history. It does not explain, however, why some groups invest a great amount of energy in producing them while others do not pay much attention to them. Human-shaped artefacts can also symbolize many different concepts and can serve various functions according to particular social conditions and needs in each society. When the sex of human-shaped artefacts is identied as female, their interpretation tends to focus on the power of biological reproduction of women. While there certainly are some universal features and traits with respect to sex in human society, social roles and cultural meanings of gender and sexuality show considerable diversity. Rather than starting with the assumption of the universal meanings of “femininity” or “motherhood,” I try to limit assumptions of universality to a minimum and consider what is unique to a particular worldview and what is based on human universals. Although it is a biological fact that women bear children, this can be interpreted in many ways. The importance of childbirth may be differently valued and recognized depending on economic and demographic conditions. Women at childbirth may be recognized as dangerous or polluted according to religious beliefs. If we hope to understand particular worldviews in the past, we should go beyond the identication of gender and engage in detailed analysis of artefacts and their archaeological contexts, which suggest how they were used. The great diversity of human-shaped artefacts is quite intriguing, as it should always be easy for anyone who wants to make human-shaped artefacts to have a model. This leads to the inference that obviously deformed gurines were not representations of ordinary women but of supernatural entities such as goddesses. The degree and nature of deviation from the natural human form would indicate what the makers of the gurines thought about the human body, which part of the body they considered important and what they wanted to emphasize. What they represented in human-shaped artefacts may not always be the actual image they had about their own bodies, but it gives us important clues about how they perceived the human body and body parts, and how they produced the image of the entity that was materialized in clay. It seems impossible to single out simple, necessary or sufcient conditions for the widespread distribution of anthropomorphic gurines, but some insights about the meanings of the gurines and the worldviews of the society that produced them can be achieved by detailed examination of archaeological contexts within a comparative perspective. The following examination of Jomon clay gurines provides an interesting case study for how we can interpret human-shaped artifacts from such a perspective. Characteristic Features of Jomon Figurines

The anthropomorphic clay gurine is one of the characteristic cultural traits of Jomon cultures, which basically disappears at the end of the Jomon period. A comprehensive review of studies of Jomon clay gurines in English has been published by Fumiko Ikawa-Smith (2002). IkawaSmith pointed out that no signicant progress had been made in terms of the function of

Jomon gurines because of the constraints of a strong “classicatory-typological framework” in Japanese archaeology. She also criticized the quest for determination of the function of gurines, which she suggests has been dominated by the assumption that there should be only one function for all the Jomon gurines, though there are some exceptions. There have been many interpretations of Jomon gurines, but, following early works by Kotaro Shirai (1896), who comprehensively proposed three possibilities of toys, religious images or ornaments, and Shogoro Tsuboi, who thought they were protective amulets (Nakajima 1943), they have mainly been seen as female gures. Although there have been a number of minor variations in interpretation, such as a goddess of childbirth, an earth goddess or a symbol of fertility, clay gurines have usually been thought to be a symbolic representation of the female sex (e.g. Fujimori 1973; Mizuno 1974; Ono 1910; Torii 1922). As regards the ritual use of the gurines, studies of excavation contexts have shown that they were probably deliberately broken. As there are few examples of gurines buried as hoards or as grave goods, nds apparently randomly discarded in settlement sites suggest that destruction and abandonment formed the nucleus of the clay gurine rituals. One version of the theories that claim clay gurines were female deities symbolizing the procreative power of women considers that they were destroyed and discarded in order to pray for an abundant harvest, assuming that subsistence was based on cultivation. Although there have been criticisms of a link between agriculture and gurines (Esaka 1990; Watanabe 2001), the idea that gurines represent women as the “procreative sex” is widespread. With the increase in archaeological examples, chronological and spatial diversity in the morphology and excavation contexts of gurines have been recognized. It has also been recognized that given the probable variety of uses of Jomon gurines in magic, ritual and burials we cannot dene their meaning along only one dimension (Noguchi 1974). For most of the 20th century, however, most interpretations have assumed that the gurines represent the female body and that “femaleness” should be the centre of their meanings. Be it as the goddess of childbirth, an earth goddess or a symbol of fertility, interpretations have focused on the biological aspect of women as reproducers. That viewpoint was most clearly stated by Isomae, who insisted that all the Jomon gurines came out of the universal “archetype” of motherhood (Isomae 1994). Changes in the representation of gurines, however, strongly indicate that the meaning and function of Jomon gurines were not the same throughout the Jomon period. The earliest example of a baked clay gurine belonging to the Incipient Jomon (ca. 11,000 BP) was found at the Kayumi-Ijiri site, in Mie Prefecture. Figurine evidence is quite rare, however, until the Initial Jomon period (10,000-6000 BP). Figurines of the Initial Jomon can be seen in the north Tohoku region, the Kanto and Chubu regions and in south Kyushu. The areas that have emergent gurines mostly correspond with the areas where settlements with substantial residential structures, mostly pit houses, were established in the Incipient Jomon. The number of gurines increased through the Early Jomon (6000-4600 BP) and reached its peak in the Middle Jomon (4600-3800 BP) in eastern Japan, while it remained extremely low in western Japan. In the Late (3800-3200 BP) and Final Jomon (3200-2800 BP), gurine production spread to most parts of the Japanese Archipelago except for the Southwestern Islands. Early gurines from the Incipient and Initial Jomon are usually small and lack representations of heads, arms or legs. These gurines have representations of breasts and thus possess only one part of the sexual characteristics of females. From the Early Jomon onwards, however, gurines have various morphological features. Figure 10.1 is a simplied illustration of those changes. Despite the common association with pregnant women, gurines with large breasts,

hips or a round belly are not that common. There are many examples with small or no breasts and which exhibit no clear sexual features. While some gurines represent a woman holding a baby, it seems inadequate to interpret Jomon gurines as representations of universal “motherhood.” Amongst this diversity of morphological changes, it is possible to see certain trends and shared characteristics. Features that are quite universal on Jomon gurines but are not always found on clay and stone gurines in other cultures are as follows. First, representations of genitals are extremely rare. Hitoshi Watanabe (2001) noted this point and argued that the gurines are mother goddesses based on the assumption that motherhood and sexuality are mutually exclusive aspects of women. He interprets the lack of genital representation as an indication of the prohibition of sexuality and therefore concludes that the gure is a mother. This interpretation relies heavily on the modern image of “mother” as seen from the viewpoint of a child, and cannot be readily applied to the Jomon period. Secondly, a projection (or depression) on the belly can be seen on many examples. This belly feature, which seems to represent a navel, often accompanies a representation of a median line which usually stretches up from the navel. An early example of the belly button feature can be seen on the “board” gurines of the Tohoku Early Jomon, and the feature becomes ubiquitous across a wide area in many gurine types from the Middle to the Final Jomon. The median line has often been identied by Japanese archaeologists, who were mostly male, as a “pregnancy stretch mark” which indicates that the gurine is pregnant. To use more accurate terms, the median line cannot be stretch marks, but may be a case of melanin pigmentation which can happen to a pregnant woman. Although this feature might actually have been the sign of a pregnant woman, it should be noted that this feature is rare among the Late and Final Jomon gurines of western Japan, which often have naturalistic representation of the female body, with protruded belly, but is rather noticeable on the non-naturalistic types of gurines. If the feature is related to the idea of pregnancy, we must consider why such a rather inconspicuous feature was chosen to be depicted on gurines while many of them do not have the prominently protruded belly, which should have been the clearest expression of pregnancy. Whatever the case may be, it is inadequate to refer to it as merely further evidence of Jomon gurines as representations of pregnant woman. Thirdly, Jomon gurines show quite a variety of facial expressions. From the Early Jomon onwards most gurines have faces, and many of them are extremely non-naturalistic. The “separation” in appearance of Jomon gurines from ordinary humans has previously been remarked upon, and the gurines with extraordinary faces have been interpreted as gods and spirits rather than ordinary women. Tatsuo Kobayashi (1996) has criticized the assumption that gurines represent women and has argued that they may represent an image of something that transcends sex. The face is the most important part of the human body for personal recognition. The recognition of personality from faces and the reading of feelings from expressions evolved as a cognitive ability that is essential to social life and thus has a universality that goes beyond cultural difference (Brown 1991). Humans are cognitively susceptible to facial structures (we see “faces” on the fronts of cars and trains) and cannot avoid reading facial expressions. Figurines with faces and gurines without faces are necessarily different with respect to human cognition and the information that can be read from them. The decision whether or not to depict a face on a gurine is probably not a question of simple technical limitations but rather is related to a particular view of people and the world.